The hike up to Mayflower Gulch
An overly detailed account of a hike in the Colorado Rockies
Mayflower Gulch Grand Traverse
Links: AllTrails, Strava here and here
We’re at the trailhead at 8:29am. The lot is about 1/8th full. We park in the 5th spot from the left on the side of the lot closer to Leadville.
Backpack contents.
Main compartment:
bits of Sierra Nevada mud and dirt from a pair of absent crampons
a 1.4L Nalgene bottle with notches every 100ml, full to the brim
Top panel, front compartment:
An Anker power bank with a single USB-C port
A USB-C to USB-C cable
A Black Diamond headlamp
Top panel, rear compartment
A set of 4 Energizer AAA batteries
Two Good and Gather Apple-Banana fruit purée pouches
Waist strap pocket
1 Good and Gather Apple-Banana fruit purée pouch
We set out at 8:39am. Our destination is in the middle distance, a partially snowed-upon cirque with a gentle slope and a surround of jagged peaks. It seems alternatingly, and sometimes simultaneously, both impossibly far away and at arm’s length.
It’s cool, perhaps 55 F, as we set out under the cover of trees. A rivulet bisects the trail.
We are at 10,990ft and breathing is heavy going. I’m reminded of our netherlandish residence in Foster City, at -3 ft, 12ft if you take into account we live on the 2nd floor. We gain a few feet, and then a few feet more. The trail leads up for the first few miles. I try to breathe in through my nose and exhale through a half open mouth. I try to keep the breath in pace with my steps. But the steps are not themselves even-paced; here a hop across water, there a slightly uneven bump in the trail, elsewhere a slight shifting of a foot in only one of two shoes. Soon I’m gasping and mouthbreathing.
Trees line either side of the trail. Some pinecones on the ground suggest that these may be pines, but are they for ex. lodgepole pines? There are 12-13 other types of pine they can be, but I don’t guess that it’s indeed the lodgepole pine I thought it couldn’t be because it’s the only one whose name I know.
The pace evens and the mouthbreathing gets fractionally more routine. We pass more trees as the trail becomes muddier, and then less muddy again. We can’t see the glacier cirque. We are stealing up its left hand side, under trees and a stream fed by an invisible, perhaps different glacier.
The grade lets up briefly and there is a table of path that gains less perceptibly than in the beginning. We pass two much older women dressed in jeans and sans backpacks and/or drinking water, chatting to each other and not sweating. My own sweat is still a rumor on the side of the temple, not yet quite free of the body, but the hoodie I have on demands immediate removal to the backpack. A water break is mooted.
My gasps for breath feel like a deficiency of plumbing, a clogging of the alimentary canal. If only one could drop a bottle of Drano down the windpipe, it might clear things up. I imagine a cartoon of clogged lungs being opened magically by expectorant as in the TV advertisements of my childhood. My nose is running. Our pace is governmentally slow.
Progress, however, is being made. At 11,450ft, we see an SUV, a 4-runner perhaps, parked at the head of a hill, and a few moments later we come to our first fork in the road. The right fork keeps to the forest. The left gives on to a vast open space with bushes, grass, flowers, bereft of tree cover, framed and dwarfed by the cirque, which is now much closer. There are two barn-like structures very close at hand, and a few more further away. People are taking pictures or resting by the sides of either nearby barn.
The mountain immediately above the cirque is now visible. Its lower reaches are gray with boulders. Its middle third is a slope of muddy snow and flanked by the boulder gray on either side. Its peak is visible in the cloudless and sheer blue sky, and very high. This is, we guess incorrectly and grandiosely, Quandary Peak, a nearby “fourteener” at 14,266ft. In fact this is Fletcher Mountain, at 13,908ft, and Quandary isn’t quite high enough for its top to be seen from our vantage.
We pass the barns, now a little more at ease with our saunter. Our goal is the terminus of this fork of the trail, at ≈12,100ft, and to see the titular mayflowers. Closer to Fletcher, we see that the boulders, loose rock and talus at its foot are patterned. Closer still, the pattern is apparent —some boulders are cleared away, a pile of some others attempt a gentle grade upwards, a different pile someways further up suggesting another grade but in the opposite direction. In other words, it’s a trail with switchbacks. The top of the mountain, by contrast, doesn’t seem to have any trail leading up to it, not from this side. Somewhere between the bottom and the top, the trail must run out, but we can’t see where.
A few more switchbacks, a winding path that ends by the side of Fletcher Mountain, and we are at the top of the trail. There’s an older couple there and we say hi. The man tells us that:
he lives in Colorado Springs
he’s done all 56 Colorado fourteeners
including Capitol Peak
he’s done Mt Elbert twice
we’re at 13,100 ft (we are at 12,100ft)
that he now coopts his wife in his hiking expeditions, and (it’s hinted at) perhaps unwillingly
that it had rained the day before, and that the two of them had climbed to 12,000ft nonetheless
that Fletcher Mountain is Atlantic Peak (it isn’t)
that there’s a ridge on the other side that leads up to Atlantic Peak (there isn’t)
We go experimentally up a snowbank at 12,200ft. I have better shoes than my partner — the soles dig in more so it’s easier to go up. Shoes notwithstanding, pushing off the leading foot means a small bet on the planted foot, which can either sink in fractionally or shift crossways, or, bafflingly, stay still. Either way my body, gently borne along the ice, is very slightly off balance, and my back and torso twist themselves with each step to redistribute weight. I’m gasping for breath — again, but this time I can’t see why it costs so much to take so few steps.
Going down the snowbank is worse because, instead of the subtly crappy dance of purchase going up, you can just slip and fall. Best just to retrace your steps in the ice, grind your foot into the slush until it feels firm, and stand with a slight bend in your knees each time both feet are on the ground.
We start heading down. Flowers sprout in rows on either side of the trail. They are smaller than the head of a thumb and pretty. There are few of them and they grow all around the cirque, in the open space, far from the treeline. They aren’t mayflowers but wildflowers, or so a review on AllTrails tells us. Most of the cirque is grass, or loose stone. Stands of trees in the distance grow on a slope and suggest their own path back down to the highway, where if you squint you can see the odd car passing by.
We make brisk pace down to 11,800ft. We can see the path of loose stones that twists up Fletcher Mountain. From here, it’s clear that the trail vanishes about halfway up, into the snowfield that runs down the middle third of the mountain. Two scrawls of path run down the snowfield, marking ski or possibly glissade trails. We go up the trail of loose boulders and rocks for a time. The summit is close. The sky remains without a trace of cloud. Over to the right, more snow is visible along a ridgeline that slopes gently upwards to the top of the same mountain.
It’s tough work under the sun to climb up loose rock. Like on the snow, the ground shifts as I move forward, but unlike it, there is an apprehension or promise of firm ground nearby, in the recess between rocks maybe, but quite unreachable. I put my foot where I can and push off on rock that tilts as I do or rolls off the side of the mountain, changing my center of gravity. My toes are constantly butting up against rock, swaddled in socks that each step forward carves out a few threads from. My toenails, long and uncut, grow warmer with each stride and don’t quite break.
A few minutes of this and we are ready to head back down — the path is unmarked on AllTrails and seems perilous despite its apparent end at the snowfield.
At 11,500 ft, we take photographs by the barns and head up the other fork. It’s short but in fact gains nearly as much elevation as the first fork, in a much briefer stint of trail. At 11,600ft, we’re checked out mentally; at 11,900ft we have 70ft of gain to go and are again completely out of breath.
At 12,000ft and the terminus of the 2nd fork, there is a ridge.
I like ridges. They :
are straight edges falling off on both sides, sometimes steeply
are a local high point
are subject to intense winds in a very small region around the edge
usually lead up to something interesting, for e.g., a summit
sometimes include a steep grade up (or down)
This ridge is, also, lined with snow. I feel compelled to climb its side, a 10ft gain over the snowbank. It’s quite easy — there are footsteps larger than our own that we merely have to place ours in. My partner follows me up. The ridge is windy, but the wind peels off sharply on either side of the ridge. It’s cold. The ledge on the far side is vistas of lakes, trees, endless ridgelines tracing the tops of old massifs still fighting gravity, still growing. We are taken by the view but are also cold and despite the direct sunlight, feel unaccountably lonely here on the other side, abruptly unseen by other hikers. We feel we have to make our way back and asap. (We are hungry.)
My partner, facing away from the snowbank as she descends, falls and slides all the 10 ft or so down. Her fall is fortunately broken by the trail immediately past the snowbank. Only her ego is bruised, as they say, but not so fast — the trail that stops her fall is split by a small stream and is itself muddy and slippery. If it didn’t support her, or if she hadn’t fallen in the right way, it could have been worse.
I climb down after her. We make our way back sobered and complete most of the rest of the trail reflecting either on my partner’s luck in not falling badly, or in our poor judgment — my poor judgment — in attempting to gain the ridge.
It is easy to go down — mostly. We see couples and their children on the trail. The treeline swallows us back up. It’s abruptly quiet. There’s not much to do but keep going. We break into a trot, then try to jog, then go back to our brisk walking pace. Our feet are tired and reveal this slowly. Mostly the glutes and hams protest. Sometimes the knees, but this is fortunately less frequent.
We are thinking of other things, like eating. Shall we do pizza or Chinese? There are no Chinese options in Leadville and scant ones in Buena Vista, the neighboring town. Buena Vista has great ice cream, though. And shall we shop? What shall we buy? And the ice cream, is it before or after the food we’ll eat? How far is Leadville? Buena Vista? Should we go north instead to Frisco, to Breckenridge even? The downhill stretch prompts every other thought than going downhill.
We reach the trailhead and the car at 12:14pm, just as groups of families and children are setting out. The sun is extremely direct and warm. The parking lot is full. In the spot next to us, a lady is feeding her dog. We drink water from the back of our rental car, still cool because the windows are tinted. We pull away. My body is smarting, my head clear.